


(i loved you) despite the warning signs

by ashkatom



Category: Hatoful Kareshi | Hatoful Boyfriend
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star Spoilers, M/M, Post-BBL
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-12
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-07-23 13:39:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7465524
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashkatom/pseuds/ashkatom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You wake up with a knife to your throat.</p>
<p>It’s not unusual, lately. No more unusual than usual, and nearly comforting. Shuu - <i>Isa</i> - <i>Shuu</i> dressed for the day as if he still has a job to go to, tie looped behind his neck but undone, hair spilling loose over his shoulders. For such a slight man, his weight is heavy against you, which is likely what woke you up. It’s been a long time since anyone has crawled into bed with you for comfort. He barely seems to breathe, eyes cold and distant as he watches you.</p>
<p>The blade, keen, balances against your skin. Slightly more pressure and you’d bleed. Less, and it wouldn’t be there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(i loved you) despite the warning signs

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lanthala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lanthala/gifts).



> Here is the sweet, light, hardly-fucked-up-at-all thing I promised you, fandom! I deliver on my promises.

You wake up with a knife to your throat.

It’s not unusual, lately. No more unusual than usual, and nearly comforting. Shuu - _Isa_ \- _Shuu_ dressed for the day as if he still has a job to go to, tie looped behind his neck but undone, hair spilling loose over his shoulders. For such a slight man, his weight is heavy against you, which is likely what woke you up. It’s been a long time since anyone has crawled into bed with you for comfort. He barely seems to breathe, eyes cold and distant as he watches you.

The blade, keen, balances against your skin. Slightly more pressure and you’d bleed. Less, and it wouldn’t be there.

You sigh and bat his hand away. “Isa,” you say, scolding, and watch him blink. His old name hasn’t stopped surprising him yet. “You’re aggravating your wounds.”

The knife falls to the pillow beside your head as Shuu’s attention flickers away. It’s not that he’s flighty so much as it is that you’re boring. Carefully boring. Unsatisfying, even with a knife biting into your throat. You sit up, dragging yourself backwards as you go and barely unsettling Shuu, then reach up to tie his tie. Precise. Careful. The tremor in your hands, you tell yourself, is only because you were sleeping five minutes ago. Adrenaline from the implicit threat of waking up in Shuu’s presence, no matter how commonplace it’s become.

“I’m not a child, Nanaki,” he says, as you slide the knot tight around his throat. He waits for your response, to see if invoking the spectre of your care will hit home.

“Mmm,” you agree, and don’t tighten the tie around his throat a millimetre more than it needs. It would be petty to choke him. “You remind me a little of Nageki, though. He was careless with his limitations, too.”

It’s amazing how light Nageki’s name feels now. You spent years unable to say it, to maintain your cover - and, because, well. You kept his name behind your teeth, a bitter secret that rotted you from the inside out. You certainly never thought you’d be saying it to Isa Souma - _Shuu_ , Shuu Iwamine - beyond the point he should have died. Nageki was always a better person than you, though. Capable of - not the absolution you had hoped for, but forgiveness. A fine line.

Shuu levers himself off you and to the edge of the bed, favouring his leg when he stands. He’s been able to walk in the house the past week or so, although he’s still confined to the wheelchair outside. He’s determined, you have to admit; the first time you woke up to a knife was the first night after you helped him home from physical therapy, when he was wrung-out and exhausted beyond measure. You got him into his bed, only barely made it to his couch before you were asleep yourself. He must have crawled the entire way to you, that night.

Sleeping with a gun has its advantages, thankfully.

Regardless, he carefully stoops to pick up his dropped cane before giving you one last, flat look and tapping his throat meaningfully. You lift your hand to touch yours in near-subconscious echo of his actions as he leaves. Sticky, red. A wound so thin and shallow you barely noticed it, but it bled more than someone unfamiliar with Shuu Iwamine would expect. When you stretch out your shirt, the neck is spotted with blood.

Sighing, you scoot back downwards into the cocoon of blankets you’ve made for yourself. Shuu woke you early, and already you can feel the world weighing down your eyelids. You roll onto your side, one of your arms bumping your gun as you wedge it under your pillow and close your eyes. Soon, you’re going to have to come to a decision on the appropriate revenge for Shuu Iwamine. He’ll be fully recovered, with only scars to show for all your last attempt amounted to, and then whatever dynamic this is between you will change. Having him at your mercy is… tenuous, predicated on the fact that he has no other option. You have to ensure that you have control over the situation as it changes, so that he doesn’t. 

That means making a decision.

Not now. Soon.

—

It’s late in the morning when you wake up again. The sun pours into your bedroom, curtains open out of habit. Your narcolepsy has never been under control - the opposite, in fact, as the stresses of working at the school worsened everything. You’ve done what you can, which mostly includes strict bedtimes and natural light in the morning. It doesn’t help, but it makes you feel better to try.

Waking up without Nageki’s voice is strange, too.

You lie in bed for a while, waiting to see if you’ll fall asleep again, watching shadows track across the room. Eventually, when the tiredness abates a little, you shove back the blankets and get up. Today is going to be a bad day, you think. Being woken up early always means struggling your way to the couch later, or waking up on the floor with no memory of lying down. No groceries today.

Shuu is absent when you make it out of your bedroom. You apologised, once, when he first cleared the room and put furniture in for you. His home isn’t as small as the one you shared with Nageki, or the small, bare set of rooms you rented close to the school. That doesn’t mean that Shuu’s home is large, in any way, and as convenient as having you around as a carer is, this is an imposition. Your apology highlighted that - how aware you are of imposing on him, how very necessary you were to him in those early stages. His resentment has been a sweetness you can rely on, when you’re not sure you’re doing the right thing by helping him.

Cooking is something that you’ve been hesitant about, in recent times. You used to be a good cook, because Nageki needed nutritious meals and because home-cooked food was the only option with how little money you had to stretch between the two of you - and more, before that. Nageki did his best to help, but the extended effort of cooking was something you preferred to take over. It’s ironic, now, that the narcolepsy presents similar difficulties for you. Mostly you try to cook when Shuu is in the room, without ever having mentioned what the problem is. Lately, with the stress off your shoulders and the ability to set your own sleeping schedule, your extreme narcoleptic episodes have mostly subsided into excessive, constant tiredness. It’s still the most awake you’ve felt in years.

Shuu doesn’t reappear as you make breakfast. Lunch, you suppose, as you section half of it off for him and sit down to eat yours. There’s a simple meditativeness to the routine you’ve settled into. It’s been good for you, inasmuch as anything about this situation is good for you. But you chose it, and you chose it clear-headed. That factor alone is perhaps the most important thing about the life you’ve cautiously been making for yourself.

Your throat stings every time you swallow.

When you go into the bathroom after slowly clearing the table and doing the dishes, the mirror shows a strip of black regrowth at your part. You’ve been careless about it, recently. Perhaps deliberately; you’ve thought, more than once, about letting your hair grow back out and cutting your last visible tie to the nastiness that you steeped in since Nageki’s death. When you rake your hair back to expose more of the black, you don’t recognise the person in the mirror, though.

Bleach powder and developer are still in the bathroom cabinet from the last time you bleached your roots. You pull them out, dump the appropriate amounts of each into a bowl and mix them together with the battered brush you’ve been using for years. This was a much more confusing process for you once, with you ending up with shocking-white roots and red-gold hair that was so dry it nearly snapped. Now you don’t even bother with gloves as you section off hair with the ends of your brush and work the bleach paste into your roots. 

Shuu’s part of lunch is gone when you emerge from the bathroom again. You left the door open as you worked, because bleach fumes and your constant exhaustion are a bad combination, but you must have been concentrating too hard to hear him. He moves silently when he wants to, with or without the limp and cane.

Despite you ostensibly being his carer - and you function in that regard as much as you can, mostly because you don’t think you know how to stop - you and Shuu Iwamine lead separate lives. You’ve been in his bedroom, because in the early weeks he needed assistance getting in and out of the wheelchair - his leg gave out from underneath him twice before he acknowledged it - but you still don’t know what he _does_ in there. Sometimes he sits on the couch in the living room as you cook dinner with a sheaf of paper densely packed with scientific phrases you barely recognise, let alone understand, injured leg elevated by propping it on the coffee table. Even that is a show of vulnerability that you weren’t expecting - until you realised that it may just be a matter of pragmatism. There’s no comfortable way for him to sit on his bed and elevate his leg, and it _is_ his home.

It was hard to imagine Shuu with a life. You spent a lot of time gathering information on him. Stalking, perhaps, is a more accurate word. Isa Souma, and the identities you found when you started digging into his mysterious appearance. You were willing to accept this young, rising star of a doctor when he was offering to help Nageki, but afterwards…

It’s not that Shuu attempts to maintain an aura of mystery. It’s more that his very air of normalcy creates it for him. Previous to living with him, you couldn’t imagine Shuu eating dinner, or sleeping, or sitting on the couch and reading. Shuu Iwamine was a rage-shaped hole you carved in the world, as far as you were concerned. Hardly a person, by the end of things. You’d like to say that the things you learned about Shuu-Isa-Utsuro made you angrier for just reasons - how dare he turn his pain outward, or some such. Glass houses and unstable grounds, though. In your darkest moments, the spectre of Nageki you carried with you whispering to you, you were mostly angry that he hadn’t given up and died before he hurt your brother.

The timer you absent-mindedly set in the kitchen goes off. You silence it and go back to the bathroom to rinse the bleach out of your hair. Bending over the drain in the floor and carefully rubbing at your scalp to dislodge all the caked-on bleach slurry, the smell of it makes you a little lightheaded. Better than the times you’ve woken up with the water gone cold over you. The liquid stings when it meets the cut on your neck, and you rinse that off too, getting your shirt wet and probably bleach-staining it a little. 

The blood had already ruined it, anyway.

You condition your hair and then dry it even though you shouldn’t, because you’ve never been able to stand the feeling of wet hair in your face and on your neck. Your roots are a little brassy, but you ran out of toner the last time you touched up your hair, so it’ll have to do. Most people don’t notice, anyway. You used to be obsessive about shaving, and bleaching your eyebrows, afraid to the core that someone would realise your identity was violently assumed. Then you forgot, one morning. Nothing happened, and then another morning. The most that ever happened was a student commenting that you were getting scruffy, once.

Still, you feel more like you by the time you dry your face.

The sink gets scrubbed, the towel you used tossed into the washing machine. You squirm out of your shirt and put it in too, though the blood on the collar has dried and you don’t have high hopes for it. Shuu’s hamper has his clothes from yesterday, so you add those in to make a load and start the cycle. That done, you wander back to the kitchen and sit a moment before starting on the next chore.

This is all you ever really wanted out of life. With Nageki - with the rest of your found family, who died in the Heartful House. A daily routine, the caretaking. It’s embarrassing to realise how much you craved it, that you’re finding satisfaction beyond the needling at your enemy. The Dove Party pays the two of you a stipend - a retainer for Shuu’s research as it becomes necessary in future, they say, but you know hush money when it falls through your fingers. 

You prepare the budget, because you do the shopping and have somehow assumed responsibility for most of the day-to-day of living. You pay the rent, and the bills. You make Shuu’s appointments and ensure that private specialists are accounted for in the budget. Both of you live frugally - you out of long practice, and Shuu mostly out of neglect. The stipend is more than enough, but you still like to balance everything. There’s a sense of completeness in knowing all the expenses, in the whittling-down to necessity. It eases a tightness in your chest to know that you’ve created this safety net.

About a third of the way through your grocery receipts, arms snake around you from behind. You tense, expecting an attack - you leave the gun under your pillow because, so far, Shuu has been too weak to attempt a fight. His only attacks - if they can even be called attacks, when really it’s a consideration more than anything - have been at night, when you were sleeping and he could reduce his disadvantages. Time to reconsider that course of action, perhaps.

The only thing that happens is Shuu burying his face in your hair.

You consider a moment, pen poised barely above the notepad you were scrawling on. This is something new. You’ve bleached your hair here before, but Shuu was less mobile then, mostly staying in his room. He tends to revile casual contact, in any case, flickers of disgruntlement showing when you pass him something and your fingers touch. He’s been surprisingly indifferent to the necessary touching involved in his care, but the casualness seems to violate some sort of autonomy issue.

Sakazaki has made meaningful comments, the times he’s visited on Dove Party business. You’re well aware that it looks - strange, your arrangements with Shuu. You’ve assumed the sorts of responsibilities that someone your age would for a spouse, and you can’t deny that strong emotions underpin your relationship. Not once, however, have you ever been in any situation with romantic overtones. Or undertones. It’s not like caring for Nageki, but it’s not as if you’re caring for a stranger, either.

In any case. You doubt this is romantically or sexually motivated. The edge of his glasses digs into you as he shifts and takes a breath, and you consider. It must be the bleach, nothing else has changed. You consider and - ah. Utsuro Ichijou spent a lot of time in hospital, free of his parents. Then the break in which he was Mishio Isshiki, and then to the Hawk labs as Isa Souma. Bleach would be a comforting smell for him, one associated with the few times he managed to create his own happiness.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” you remark, in Kazuaki’s airy, breathless tones. You’ve forgotten what your own voice sounds like, over the years, but it’s not like Shuu expects any more than this from you. You’ve been Kazuaki so long - bleached yourself back into Kazuaki just earlier - that you don’t expect you’ll ever be anyone else again. Some strange, nameless melt-together of Kazuaki and Hitori may be the best you can hope for.

Shuu makes a disgruntled noise into your hair at your comment. His sleeves slide against your arms as he adjusts to lean on you more - he left his cane in his room, of course, your nagging has only been half-efficient there. “Your ribs are showing,” he says. From anyone else, it would be an expression of concern. From Shuu, it’s quite nearly a compliment, and it makes you realise that you forgot to get another shirt after putting yours in the laundry.

You’ve had enough of closing your eyes and pretending Nageki is there to last you a lifetime, for all that you thought you wouldn’t last a lifetime without it. Still, you’ve run cold since your carefully-not-fatal dose of pills, which means even the bare warmth of Shuu’s arms through his sleeves is comforting. It’s not Nageki. It doesn’t have to be Nageki.

It is Nageki’s murderer. Finding comfort in Isa Souma’s arms is never going to be comfortable, for that reason. But today… today you’ve gone through the sort of routine you’ve always wished you had, and it’s been soothing. The kind of life Nageki wanted for you, if not with the ideal person. The fingerprints his death left on you feel a little less clawed-in, the life Kazuaki Nanaki should have lived a little less present. You get to shape whoever you are, now, and it turns out that who you are is mostly someone who wants to sleep and eat, cook and get groceries, balance a budget and do the laundry and all the thousand little things that make up life when your life is not a sword weighing over someone else’s head.

You sigh and tilt your head back, letting it rest on Shuu’s shoulder without making eye contact. “You have another appointment for physical therapy this afternoon.”

“I have experiments,” Shuu says, after a moment.

You put a little steel into your tone when you say, “You also have physical therapy.” Shuu makes another, more defeated disgruntled noise after a moment, and you continue on, airy again. “I think I’ll take a nap before, but I’ve booked a taxi anyway. Don’t ignore it.”

There’s a long silence, long enough that you’re thinking about pushing Shuu off and going back to the budget, but then he says, “My room is darker, if you need sleep.”

More new things. Concern, for one. He offered to make you something for sleep not long after you moved in, but anyone who ingests anything Shuu Iwamine gives them has only their own self to blame for the consequences. This is more a recontextualisation - he knows the problem, knows no rooms are dark during the day, has found you on the couch with blankets pulled over your head when things have gotten to be too much. This near-apologetic gesture is another - he’s made the connection between your bad narcolepsy days and the times he’s woken you up, but he’s never seemed to care one way or another before.

And challenge. Always challenge, always the thin wall of glass with both your hands against it. One day the wall will shatter, but neither of you can resist pushing at it. Sleeping in his room will make you vulnerable. Neither of you know when, one day, the knife will bite down or the trigger will move that final millimetre. 

“Mmm,” you say, non-committal, and shrug him off as you focus back on your budgeting. “Maybe later.”

You hardly notice him leaving. That’s no surprise.

—

Your room, west-facing, is too bright in the afternoon to nap well. Tapping on Shuu’s door gets an affirmative grunt, so you push the door open while carefully not second-guessing yourself.

He’s busy at his desk, leaning his chin on one hand as he scrolls through documents with the other. Shoved into the corner, against the wall, a flask of viscous red liquid catches the light in a strange way, while something clear simmers on a hotplate. In the other corner, nearest to his bed, the laptop’s glow reflects off the blade of his preferred knife.

Without talking, you take the gun from your waistband. The air in the room goes thick enough with tension that you have to remind yourself to breathe, only for the tension to disappear when you stow the gun under one of the pillows. You crawl under the covers and roll onto your side, fiddle with your phone to set an alarm for a few hours out. Shuu, in your peripheral vision, turns back to his work.

You drop your phone on the pillow next to you, close your eyes. The familiar exhaustion takes over from there.

You’ll have to make a decision about your revenge on Shuu Iwamine.

Not now. But soon.


End file.
